Altered

When your baby dies, when you touch a cold corpse that just a few days prior you had held, loved, kissed, death becomes different.  You yearn for it, you think of ways that it could happen to you.  You beg to die, to be with her, to be escorted from this earth, to disengage from the pain that is now a part of you.  Death is no longer taboo or relative it is very much a part of you and so real that you can feel its cold breathe on the tip of your shoulder.

 

As I look into April, what this month is, what this month should be, I am once again focused on death, her death.  The absence of a life and an altered reality that I somehow just can't get used to and inevitably never will. 

 

Three

 

Can you imagine what a three year old Kelsie would be like?  I can, I see her everyday.  I see her as I pause at the end of my day and I sit quietly on my couch.  My eyes flow from one side of the room to the other visioning her presence.  Visioning what my life would be like as her mom.  When the silence fills my car on the way home, I imagine myself picking her from daycare, her arms wrapping around my leg, a smile - her smile - my smile.  When I walk outside to grab the mail I see her small feet following me down the walkway begging for a chance to dance in the sun.  I would dance with her, I wouldn't miss that moment. 

 

Want

 

Birthdays that I will never celebrate the way I want. I don't want to light another candle, fill another cemetery vase full of Daisies or release another lantern.  I want life.  Today I live life as I am forced to not how I want to.  I can accept, and even honor that some days...well most days now.  I have to remember to take care of myself.  Remember what my body, my spirit, my soul, has brought me through thus far.  I can acknowledge death, darkness, pain, suffering, and the agony of a loss so tragic I also can acknowledge joy, love, laughter, the warm sun after the storm, and the journey of a new life.  I can step away from deaths cold breath and live in the warmth of life.   I can enjoy today even as the tears find there way from the corner of my eye and stroll the familiar path down my cheek. 

 

Live

 

I will continue to live, I have so much to live for and so much to give and of course much to take as well.  Death is still yearned for but not as deep, not as critical as it was in the beginning.  Life has become altered in a way that is "ok" and sometimes even "good".   

 

Some days it's just "breathe".   Some days I can breathe in the life that is forced and breathe out a smile.  Some days  I can breathe in the pain and breathe out gratitude.

 

~Summer